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dgharmon writes "'I hate it,' Wozniak told Bloomberg in Shanghai today, referring to the patent battle. He thinks the ruling will be overruled. Samsung will of course appeal, and this case will go back and forth for months still, but Wozniak just wishes everyone could get along. 'I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies,' he said."

Everyone has been copying from everyone else in this industry for decades, including Apple itself. Now that they're the king of the hill, they want to change the rules. Too bad for them, this kind of crap means that every other player will now proceed to nuke them with everything at their disposal - and rightly so./me is eagerly waiting for a lawsuit over LTE in iPhone 5 from Samsung...

And that's why you don't understand what it means. It doesn't mean LITERALLY steal. It means you find something you love, and understand it totally... then you re-make it into something that is like it was but is wholly yours.

It's a hard concept to explain without more understanding of art and creativity... this book will help [amazon.com].

The specific (whole) quote that everyone likes to reference ("Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing good ideas.") was made during a 1996 PBS documentary called Triumph of the Nerds.

Everyone has been copying from everyone else in this industry for decades, including Apple itself. Now that they're the king of the hill, they want to change the rules. Too bad for them, this kind of crap means that every other player will now proceed to nuke them with everything at their disposal - and rightly so./me is eagerly waiting for a lawsuit over LTE in iPhone 5 from Samsung...

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

I hate Apple with a passion but you're just wrong. The F700 came out just slightly after the iPhone. Obviously they both had to be in development around the same time but Apple was in fact first.

The myth posted above has be debunked many times, just use a little Google-fu and you will see.

Samsung wanted to submit evidence they had ripped off Sony instead who had done the shape before. For that matter, the XDA (MS Phone years ago) seemed to me to be the grand daddy device that looked very much the same.

Oh well, doubt the appeal court will have such an obviously Apple fangirl for a judge. So Apple will loose and all will be well again. But it would be nice if the asian tech giants told apple for its next device. Nope, sorry, we don't have any items in stock at the moment. Go shop somewhere else. Oh there isn't? Well, go complain to the US tech companies that outsources all tech then.

Nice slippery comment there, "I hate but". Really who gives a crap. Reality is Apple had a fad product it knew it, it knew it was eventually doomed to collapse as all fad products are and is attempting to fend off that collapse as long as possible, via the laws courts and basically damn the consequences (the retaliation will not end once the delay is over, break a cease fire and the rest go in for the kill). As for those schmucks who have invested heavily in Apple's wildly inflated share price, two words,

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

I hate Apple with a passion but you're just wrong. The F700 came out just slightly after the iPhone. Obviously they both had to be in development around the same time but Apple was in fact first.

The myth posted above has be debunked many times, just use a little Google-fu and you will see.

Indeed, the F700 was publicly shown just a few weeks after the iPhone's first appearance. However, Samsung had filed for a Korean design patent on the F700 several weeks before the iPhone was revealed. It exactly matched the F700 (BTW, there were rounded corners on the rectangle). The whole "who did it first" issue is stupid, and describing it as "copying our innovation" is utter lunacy, when basic design principles lead to just a few possibilities, all of which were released by somebody.

Please go and read the USPTO design patent D504889 (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=D504,889.PN.&OS=PN/D504,889&RS=PN/D504,889) and then come back to us. That particular patent is **exactly** a rectangle with rounded corners.

There may have been other patents in play, but that one is essentially what people complain about when the discuss this issue.

I, for one, despise design patents. The whole point of patents were to be novel (ie, new), non-obvious (to those versed in the art), and **useful** - that's the three-prong test for a valid invention. Design patents are only allowed on non-functional (hence non-useful) stuff and have therefore mangled the entire inventive process.

Longer answer: While trademark and design patents are very similar, I believe that design patents doesn't require proof that consumer confusion could result like a trademark does.

Samsung could have made their tablet look very different than the iPad. Just look at the Nook Color, Nokia's N810, or the many mock-ups of a Nokia Tablet that look like an oversized Nokia Lumia 900 (which I think looks good).

Anyway, the Samsung Galaxy Tablet and the iPad are almost indistinguishable from each other when the power

They are tools for the rich to keep new players from entering the field, and ones that are brave enough to do it anyway are easily crushed. Those sorts of patents are not tools FOR the people. They are tools AGAINST the people and in favor of the tyrannical wealthy elite whose corporations run our government.

The patent system is broken and has already collapsed upon itself. Time to simply burn it or pretend it no longer exists. I find it humorous to think I can be sued for auto-updating in my apps.

The entire system was meant to be FOR US... you know. The people. The inventor. The little guy. So we could bring something to market without being crushed by some charismatic douchebag with more money than brains. Now whoever wants to cut a check to the USPTO gets to patent just about anything they want, valid or not. It's up to you to raise the millions to fight the claim if they are BS patents.

This system is utterly and completely broken and useless and only serves as a way to ensure all innovation

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

The original iPhone was announced on Jan 2007.

The Samsung F700 was announced on Feb 2007 (a month after Steve Job's demonstration) during the 3GSM World Congress, and released on November 2007.

The Samsung F700 may have had rounded corners, but it was substantially thicke

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

The original iPhone was announced on Jan 2007.

The Samsung F700 was announced on Feb 2007 (a month after Steve Job's demonstration) during the 3GSM World Congress, and released on November 2007.

The Samsung F700 may have had rounded corners, but it was substantially thicker and had a sliding keyboard. The UI running on their Croix OS did not resemble the iPhone at all. When the F700 was announced it was immediately compared to the newly announced iPhone by the press.

no but the palm pre did. and as for a phone being thicker they have been getting thinner since there inception. the combining of traits into one phone is obvious evolution in the technology.

I don't know why this is modded up to 5 when it's verifiably false. Their demos were a month or so apart, with F700 coming a bit later, and LG Prada with similar design came out a few months before them both. If anything, it just shows that market was coming to this already.

Anyways, I find Apple fanboys' claims about "blatant copying" rather silly, considering courts have mostly denied Apple's claims about copying (up to telling Apple to apologize in UK's case) and most surviving claims are utility patents related, though even those didn't fare as well as Apple hoped.

So yeah, it seems "infringing on a software patent" == "blatantly copying" in their lingo.

From the article:This picture above says the F700 was shown at CeBit 2006, and then released in 2007, making Apple and the iPhone the one that copied them. This is completely false. We here love Android, not Apple, but this is a interesting story and I just felt like sharing either way.

While there are clearly other "iPhone-like" phones released before the iPhone, the Samsung F700 wasn't it. All that Wikipedia notes is that Samsung was ISSUED a design patent for the phone before Steve Jobs made his iPhone product announcement.

The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700) cites a Businessweek article (http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/16106-apple-s-war-on-android) that points to a convergence in the evolution of cellphone designs.

The F700 was announced in Feburary 2007 at Mobile World Congress, after the iPhone was announced in January at MacWorld. It also relied on a slide-out keyboard, so in usage they are not very similar at all. And the appearance of the UI is very different, it doesn't have the design features which were the subject of this lawsuit.

Show's how little you know

You need to consider each patent separately. The UI with four icons has nothing to do with the patent on the physical design. Nor does the four icon layout have anything to do with the slide to unlock patent.

I have no opinion on the design patent question beyond it just seems silly to my non-designer mind. As an actual software developer I do take issue with the software patents and as a member of the human race I take issue with the concept of "owning" ideas in general.

But what really gets me is the litigation apologists who selectively treat these patents as either severable or not depending on the direction the wind is blowing in order to rationalize the desertification the intellectual commons.

If it were just Samsung getting a little sloppy about Apple's design patents, you'd have a point. But the motivation for this war is the belief that Android itself is one big ripoff of iOS and needs to die [bbc.com]. If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.

You say there are alternatives? These are a few small time platforms that manage to stay outside Apple's claimed IP They will always be too nonstandard to attract significant user or developer mindshare.

Nokia and Microsoft license agreements with Apple seem pretty fair: Apple agrees to license their patents if their competitors agree not to clone their devices or interfaces. Nokia has used the rubberbanding patent and others, and are not at issue as long as their designs are reasonably different from Apple's. The goal is clear: make your device immediately identifiable. The patent decision itself is a proxy for this much broader issue.

Yeah, that should work out, assuming Apple management is sane enough to drop Steve Jobs's anti-Android Jihad. Nobody deserves to die the way Steve Jobs did, but I'm not at all sorry that his obsessions are no longer Apple corporate policy.

If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.

Or we'll actually see some innovation. I have an Android phone, and the UI sucks. From playing with an iPhone, it seems most of the bad ideas were ones copied from iOS. I played very briefly with a Windows phone and it was at least different, although I didn't use it for long enough to tell if it was actually better. It was owned by someone leaving MSR, who was looking forward to replacing it, so he apparently didn't think so, but if enough people are trying new ideas then eventually one will end up with

If they were "exact copies" why are verdicts from all over the world centered on software patents like slide to unlock and multitouch gestures, not design patents? Why's Apple suing Samsung for Galaxy SIII when it was widely claimed to be "phone designed by lawyers" as to avoid infringements?

Sorry, but "Apple only has a bone with Samsung because they make exact copies" don't really work, considering those verdicts, SIII lawsuit and preceding lawsuits with other major Android manufacturers.

Because if it is not completely, exactly, to the nth degree the same then it isn't a pure copy, and the lawsuit would not be won.

If you win a lawsuit against some trivially stupid shit (as almost all patent lawsuits seem to be), you have the power to enforce terms on the things that the law won't let you protect which may be more important to you.

So what you're saying is that Samsung's 'phones were dressed provocatively and Samsung was asking for it.

(OK, what's you're actually saying is that you have a qusi-religious devotion to Apple, or shares that you want to be maintained as ridiculously high as possible, but I'm trying to imagine you as having more of a character.)

So Samsung's buddy Google warned Samsung to put some different clothes on, and that makes what Apple did OK. Gotcha.

So how does the fact that Samsung was suing Apple in the same case fit into your cute little rape analogy? Speaking of, I wonder what someone who has actually suffered a sexual assault would think of your flippant comparison to.....a patent suit.

But the jury does not decide questions of law, the case is at first instance, and Apple are not required to bring proceedings anyway, so your post demonstrates a pedestrian lack of both understanding and useful content.

So what if Samsung copied. Yes, if they did, it would be illegal, but that just means they should suffer a reasonable penalty.

Do you really think the amount Samsung had to pay Apple was reasonable?

First you have to prove that Samsung's copying of Apple products benefited Samsung. Sure you can point to Samsung's sales, but if you interview people who bought their products, none would tell you it was because of the iphone similarity.

I bought my galaxy S DESPITE the similarity, not because of it. I was happy enough with the phone that I was prepared to suffer the embarrassment of owning a phone that looked like an iphone (but clearly bigger).

Do you really think all those samsung phone owners were happy every time someone asked "is that an iphone?".

Personally I don't know and don't care if Samsung copied Apple. In my view there is no way that is worth 1 billion dollars. That is basically saying that Samsung contributed nothing to their own phone, or that people only bought it because of (Apple's) design. It isn't just wrong, it is ridiculous.

Do you think Apple is being honest about all this?They are trying to include the Galaxy S3 now - a phone that looks nothing like any iphone ever made. And yet they are trying to make similar 'copying' claims about it.

IMO the original galaxy S1 and maybe the galaxy tab 10.1 are the only devices Apple actually has any shred of a valid claim against. But they are clearly not suing samsung for the reasons they state.

Friendly Reminder: Apple, Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is permitted to like.

No, Apple's off the list because they're so ridiculously evil nowadays. Their sole goal is to lock you into their own ecosystem and prevent you from doing what you want with your purchased devices, and they're actively trying to destroy anyone they compete with.

Friendly Reminder: Apple, Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is permitted to like.

No, Apple's off the list because they're so ridiculously evil nowadays. Their sole goal is to lock you into their own ecosystem and prevent you from doing what you want with your purchased devices, and they're actively trying to destroy anyone they compete with.

Sooo.... Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is officially not permitted to criticise? Has Samsung then replaced Apple on that list?

Whoa, wait there, camper! What exactly is it that Google is doing that is so high and mighty? Selling your soul to advertisers? At least when you use Apple products you are the customer. When you use Google services, you are the product.

At least Google doesn't try to hide the fact that they are advertising to you, and offer great compensation in the form of high-quality services such as search and mail. On the other hand, you're paying Apple to be the product.

Since they are not human (or even biological individuals) with an overriding primary goal of delivering the best possible shareholder value that legal restrictions permit[1] and do not acknowledge moral or ethical constraints then I think evil is the most appropriate adjective.

Disclaimer: I'm employed by one but I'm not foolish enough to actually trust it.

[1] Fortunately (for them) political entities are susceptible to bribery to get

We tried world peace once. Then with all their new found free time mankind discovered magnetic monopoles. Unfortunately these did not coexist well with the Higgs boson and the universe collapsed on itself only to be replaced by an alternate universe that did not have world peace.

I suspect that nearly everyone except the lawyers and leadership wish we could get along. When the patent system was envisioned a long time ago, progress didn't happen nearly as quickly, consumerism wasn't so rampant (you didn't buy a new ANYTHING every two years except maybe a toothbrush), and the manufacturing cycle was MUCH longer than it is today.

I consider the lawyers of these tech companies (Apple, Samsung, Oracle, etc) to be exploiting 'bugs' in the patent system, and I suspect that most others do as well. The patent system needs a hotfix, and there's no political pressure to do so.

Basically, at least as far as high tech is concerned, the patent system has morphed from its original "encourage inventors to share and explain their inventions in exchange for a short period of official monopoly" to a legally-empowered version of "I call dibs on that." Rather than developing something and patenting the result, people are observing trends, anticipating where things will go, and patenting that. Sometimes (such as with Apple) they proceed to actually develop something, and other times (as with patent trolls) they just wait to cash in. But in either case, the patent boils down to "I was the first person to tell the Patent Office that things were moving in this direction."

Agreed. We are well into the era of preemptive patents, where people claim as many possible permutations of function, form and use as they can without inventing anything. Which of course halts any sort of progress completely.

On the subject of "permutations", that brings to mind one particular kind of problem: patents being issued for a specific instantiation of an already-documented abstraction. For example, a few years ago there was a patent dispute (involving RIM, I think) where the patent was basically "sending email over a wireless connection." But a major point of the OSI and TCP/IP layer models is that the implementation of a given layer isn't supposed to care (or even know) about the implementation of another layer. IMAP

'Well, no, I don't think it fair to say it "morphed" into what it is today. The patent system was created precisely to be "a legally-empowered version of 'I call dibs on that'" with the idea that by doing so, you'd "encourage inventors to share and explain their eventions" but their "call dibs on that" would be "a short period of official monopoly". To that end, the rather high-profile, high-tech boom of patenting anything and everything "on the internet" would seem to be a great boon in that it means in ~2

First, because its not "of California", as it is in a U.S. federal court that happens to be located in California.

But mostly because its not even (yet, and quite possibly ever) even a decision in that court. Its the jury verdict which is still the subject of several post-verdict motions before the court finally (not considering appeals) decides on a judgement in the case.

"For anything non-trivial, it is simply illegal to develop software." Companies are getting away with patenting things that are trivial and obvious, for almost any piece of software, you're tripping over dozens of patents. If we were to enforce the letter of the law, developing software is illegal.

It leaves the little guy relying on the "and play nice". This is basically what we had in the mobile phone industry between 2006 and 2011 (or whenever Apple kicked off this nonsense). Before 2006, Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others were all suing each other over 3G patents. They came to a settlement where everyone decided to cross license their patents and offer FRAND licensing so that the little guys didn't get shut out. The problem is that Apple came along and took advantage of the little guy provisions to enter the market, then started throwing patents around which are very much not being offered on FRAND terms ($30 per device for half a dozen UI interaction patents, vs $6 for hundreds of radio and networking hardware patents?).

I knew Woz about 25-30 years ago when I worked as a systems engineering consultant in the Silicon Valley. He always impressed me as an engineer who was more focused on creating wild and new stuff, vs. Jobs who wanted to rule the world...:-) Well, Jobs ruled the world for awhile, but the Woz is still kicking ass and taking names!

One Steve made a name for himself by opening up computers. His idea that a desktop computer should be a big open platform that anybody can plug into dominates computer design to this very day, and had a lot to do with the explosive growth of computing.

The other Steve wanted to close up smartphones [bbc.com]. Come to think of it, he took a control-freak attitude toward every product he ever launched. Ironic, really.

I love Steve Woz. He is a really cool guy and is really the original brains behind Apple. Apple may have skyrocketed into fame because of Steve Jobs' marketing but its Woz that made Apple who they are today. The man is a old fashioned hacker, which is something that is missing from today's computer hardware and software companies. The computer enthusiasts have been replaced by the greedy business men in the computer world and its really sad.

Woz is so cool. If only he were Apple's CEO, we wouldn't be having all these lawsuits, and we'd probably have some REAL innovation from Apple (not catching up to making a 4" screen and including LTE). C'mon, smartphone makers, where's that long-lasting battery power (perhaps with a solar panel on the back to boot)? Where's that built-in holographic projector (a la R2-D2)? Think how useful that would be in the corporate world! (Not to mention gaming!)

Yeah, he's a much nicer guy, but engineers tend to make lousy CEOs. Jobs had some rather negative attributes, but he did change the world. Woz doesn't have that drive, so much as the drive to do the impossible and have fun doing it. It was the combination that was so powerful.

Apple was losing money because of the mac cloners when Steve Jobs returned.

What an utter load of crap. When Apple finally stopped the macintosh cloning they designed and sold an inexpensive mac, the classic. All that did was convert them from a niche player with high margins into a niche player with low margins. Thats when they turned unprofitable, but they had to try because the stakes were so high.

Yeah, you could choose intel and get performance and quality or go with a crapshoot of various chipsets and AMD processors. BFD. In reality, you had very little choice. They all ran windows and had crapware on them unless if you built your own but most people did not do that.

The choice wasnt in the processor or the chipset. The choice was in the peripherals, and what a dumb fuck you are if you thought dos and later win3 machines were shipped with crapwar

You don't get ahead by sharing everything you make and helping out the competition.

Yes, you do.

Open Source has proven this to be the case, even winning over the historical corporate bastion of conservatism that is IBM. I had two machines on my desk. One Windows, one Linux. Both made the company money by different means.

It's the old question of "getting more of the pie" versus "growing the pie"--the difference being, in software, you can grow the pie exponentially and at a trivial incremental cost. When the domain of technological possibility is grown like that, there's more room for profitable activities for everyone involved.

And... no, Apple lost because the Lisa and Macintosh were absurdly high-priced for their capabilities. IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing. Windows just eliminated Apple's sole claim to advantage, and had the clearly better OS until... well, Apple stuck to tradition and stole the BSD OS. That they don't -like- sharing doesn't alter that they'd have no OS for their desktop/laptop systems without people who did like sharing, before they slapped an "Apple" label on others' work.

As the final argument on how this history proceeded, we can look at what happened when IBM tried to "pull an Apple" with the PS/2 and proprietary interfaces--an unmitigated disaster in the market. It's working for the time being for Apple as history repeats itself, but I expect it won't be long until Android reverses the perceptions again--it's just important to understand that there are alternatives to rapacious business, and spending your money exclusively on that just harms progress and technology for everyone, regardless of immediate perceptions. Though, granted, Apple is all about immediate perceptions...

I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies

Then what why would we need patents, except for preventing newcomers to enter the market? Again, this is something that hinder innovation. Once you realize patent prevent innovation in a given field, why not stand against them

We can have software patents and have them be reasonable with one simple little rule.

Look at the CODE. We have design patents for a reason. If the code is significantly different (e.g. written in ASM vs C or Java) it is a unique implementation. If it's written in the same language, see how much it differs to achieve the same effect. A given language may only have one way to do things, so that part can't be given as part of the patent. Just like one can patent different designs of things like LED lights (even if they use the same components and number of each component, positioning for effect/etc is patentable as a design patent) and other items.

the courts are totally forgetting about design patents here. They could be ruling in a way that works both ways, and it is within their power; they are just too stupid to realize this and do so for the benefit of the country and competition.